ARTICLE: The M.R.S. and the Ph.D. By STEPHANIE COONTZ

TODAY women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees and more than half of master’s and Ph.D.’s. Many people believe that, while this may be good for women as income earners, it bodes ill for their marital prospects.

As Kate Bolick wrote in a much-discussed article in The Atlantic last fall, American women face “a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be ‘marriageable’ men — those who are better educated and earn more than they do.” Educated women worry that they are scaring away potential partners, and pundits claim that those who do marry will end up with unsatisfactory matches. They point to outdated studies suggesting that women with higher earnings than their husbands do more housework to compensate for the threat to their mates’ egos, and that men who earn less than their wives are more likely to experience erectile dysfunction.

Is this really the fate facing educated heterosexual women: either no marriage at all or a marriage with more housework and less sex? Nonsense. That may have been the case in the past, but no longer. For a woman seeking a satisfying relationship as well as a secure economic future, there has never been a better time to be or become highly educated.

For more than a century, women often were forced to choose between an education and a husband. Of women who graduated from college before 1900, more than three-quarters remained single. As late as 1950, one-third of white female college graduates ages 55 to 59 had never married, compared with only 7 percent of their counterparts without college degrees.

CAs a single, well educated, above average looking man in his early 40s with a good career, and who has been actively dating (or trying to)...


Some of these women chose to stay single, of course, and that choice has always been easier and more rewarding for educated women. But the low marriage rates of educated women in the past were also because of the romantic and sexual prejudices of men. One physician explained the problem in Popular Science Monthly in 1905: An educated woman developed a “self-assertive, independent character” that made it “impossible to love, honor and obey” as a real wife should. He warned that as more middle-class women attended college, middle-class men would look to the lower classes to find uneducated wives.

That is exactly what happened in the mid-20th century. From 1940 to the mid-1970s, the tendency for men to marry down educationally became more pronounced and the cultural ideal of hypergamy — that women must marry up — became more insistent.

Postwar dating manuals advised women to “play dumb” to catch a man — and 40 percent of college women in one survey said they actually did so. As one guidebook put it: “Warning! ... Be careful not to seem smarter than your man.” If you hide your intelligence, another promised, “you’ll soon become the little woman to be pooh-poohed, patronized and wed.”

Insulting as it may have been, such advice was largely sound. Studying national surveys on mate preferences, David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, and his colleagues found that in 1956, education and intelligence were together ranked 11th among the things men sought in a mate. Much more important to them was finding a good cook and housekeeper who was refined, neat and had a pleasing disposition. By 1967, education and intelligence had moved up only one place, to No. 10, on men’s wish lists.

Men in the postwar period were threatened by the thought of a woman with more or even as much education as they had. One man who taught at a women’s college in the 1950s told me his colleagues used to joke that once they knew a woman had earned a Ph.D., they didn’t even need to ask what she had specialized in: clearly, it was in “Putting Hubby Down.”

But over the past 30 years, these prejudices have largely disappeared. By 1996, intelligence and education had moved up to No. 5 on men’s ranking of desirable qualities in a mate. The desire for a good cook and housekeeper had dropped to 14th place, near the bottom of the 18-point scale. The sociologist Christine B. Whelan reports that by 2008, men’s interest in a woman’s education and intelligence had risen to No. 4, just after mutual attraction, dependable character and emotional stability.


The result has been a historic reversal of what the economist Elaina Rosecalls the “success” penalty for educated women. By 2008, the percentage of college-educated white women ages 55 to 59 who had never been married was down to 9 percent, just 3 points higher than their counterparts without college degrees. And among women 35 to 39, there was no longer any difference in the percentage who were married.

African-American women are less likely to marry than white women overall, but educated black women are considerably more likely to marry than their less-educated counterparts. As of 2008, 70 percent of African-American female college graduates had married, compared with 60 percent of high school graduates and just 53 percent of high school dropouts.

One reason educated heterosexual women may worry about their marriage prospects today is that overall marriage rates have been slipping since 1980. But they have slipped less for educated women than for anyone else. Furthermore, college-educated women, once they do marry, are much less likely to divorce. As a result, by age 30, and especially at ages 35 and 40, college-educated women are significantly more likely to be married than any other group. And according to calculations by the economist Betsey Stevenson, an educated woman still single at age 40 is much more likely to marry in the next decade than her less educated counterparts.

Even for women who don’t marry, it’s better to be educated; a 2002 study found that never-married white women with more education than average lived “the longest, healthiest lives of all groups.”

ONE of the dire predictions about educated women is true: today, more of them are “marrying down.” Almost 30 percent of wives today have more education than their husbands, while less than 20 percent of husbands have more education than their wives, almost the exact reverse of the percentages in 1970.

But there is not a shred of evidence that such marriages are any less satisfying than marriages in which men have equal or higher education than their wives. Indeed, they have many benefits for women.

In a forthcoming paper from the Council on Contemporary Families, Oriel Sullivan, a researcher at Oxford University, reports that the higher a woman’s human capital in relation to her husband — measured by her educational resources and earnings potential — the more help with housework she actually gets from her mate. The degree to which housework is shared is now one of the two most important predictors of a woman’s marital satisfaction. And husbands benefit too, since studies show that women feel more sexually attracted to partners who pitch in.

Speaking of which, educated wives also get better sex, whatever their partner’s educational level, according to the sexuality researchers Pepper Schwartz and Virginia Rutter. They are more likely to receive as well as give oral sex, to use a greater variety of sexual positions and to experience orgasm regularly.

Certainly, some guys are still threatened by a woman’s achievements. But scaring these types off might be a good thing. The men most likely to feel emotional and physical distress when their wives have a higher status or income tend to be those who are more invested in their identity as breadwinners than as partners and who define success in materialistic ways. Both these traits are associated with lower marital quality. Few women really want to marry a man whose penis rises and falls in tandem with the size of his paycheck or the prestige of his diploma.

Yet when the journalist Liza Mundy interviewed young women for her forthcoming book on female breadwinners, she found that most wanted a mate they could “look up to” or “admire” — and didn’t think they could admire a man who was less educated than they were. During a talk I recently gave to a women’s group in San Francisco, an audience member said, “I want him to respect what I know, but I also want him to know just a little more than me.” One of my students once told me, “it’s exciting to be a bit in awe of a guy.”

For a century, women have binged on romance novels that encouraged them to associate intimidation with infatuation; it’s no wonder that this emotional hangover still lingers. Valentine’s Day is a perfect time to reject the idea that the ideal man is taller, richer, more knowledgeable, more renowned or more powerful. The most important predictor of marital happiness for a woman is not how much she looks up to her husband but how sensitive he is to her emotional cues and how willing he is to share the housework and child-care. And those traits are often easier to find in a low-key guy than a powerhouse.

I am not arguing that women ought to “settle.” I am arguing that we can now expect more of a mate than we could when we depended on men for our financial security, social status and sense of accomplishment. But that requires ditching the Lois Lane syndrome, where we ignore the attractions and attention of Clark Kent because we’re so eager for the occasional fly-by from Superman.

PERSONAL: DEAR GOD

I found this in one of my draft and decided to put it up. I think i wrote this a few years ago.


Dear God,

Sometimes I feel lonely. I feel like everyone I know has found a wife and I desperately long to have one of my own. You declared in Genesis that it is not good for man to be alone (Genesis 2:18).  That is why you made a helper for Adam. God, I long for the affection of a spouse. I long for an intimacy  I long for that sexual, physical, emotional, and intellectual connection that can be had with a woman.  I pray that You lead me to a woman that will love me for me, God  

You understand my desires of the flesh.  Being single is tough,  I don’t want to give away such a personal part of me to some woman that I won’t spend my life with.   I don’t want to settle for someone who You don’t want me with.  I want a physical connection so bad!  I want to hold hands, kiss and  have sex.  I want hour long conversations at night!  But, I don’t want to settle just to have these things. God,  please hear my prayer to You!   Give me strength for today as I continue searching for a spouse.  

Being single is a gift.  There is nothing wrong with being single, but I still long for a partner in this life.  God, while I am waiting, give me strength to endure each day.  I will keep hoping and dreaming.  I can imagine what our first kiss will feel like!  I can imagine how wonderful holding hands will be!  I can imagine how emotionally connected we will be through long conversations!  I can imagine how attractive they will be and outshine all of the rest around me!  God, I absolutely love You and I want to show that love to a mate!  Guide me to someone who will be good for me.  I love You!  

ARTICLE: To Stay in Love, Sign on the Dotted Line By MANDY LEN CATRON

To Stay in Love, Sign on the Dotted Line By MANDY LEN CATRON

A few months ago my boyfriend and I poured ourselves two beers and opened our laptops. It was time to review the terms of our relationship contract.

Did we want to make changes? As Mark and I went through each category, we agreed to two minor swaps: my Tuesday dog walk for his Saturday one, and having me clean the kitchen counters and him take over the bathtub.

The latest version of “Mark and Mandy’s Relationship Contract,” a four-page, single-spaced document that we sign and date, will last for exactly 12 months, after which we have the option to revise and renew it, as we’ve done twice before. The contract spells out everything from sex to chores to finances to our expectations for the future. And I love it.

Writing a relationship contract may sound calculating or unromantic, but every relationship is contractual; we’re just making the terms more explicit. It reminds us that love isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we’re making together. After all, this approach brought us together in the first place.

Two and a half years ago, I wrote a Modern Love column about how Mark and I had spent our first date trying a psychological experiment that used 36 questions to help two strangers fall in love. That experience helped us to think about love not as luck or fate, but as the practice of really bothering to know someone, and allowing that person to know you. Being intentional about love seems to suit us well.

In the past, expecting a relationship to work simply because the people involved loved each other had failed me. I spent my 20s with a man who knew exactly what he wanted and how he wanted to be. All I had wanted was for him to love me.

We were together for almost a decade, and in that time I somehow lost track of my own habits and preferences. If I wanted to split the grocery bill, he suggested I buy only things we both liked. If I wanted to spend weekends together, I could go skiing with him and his friends. And so I did. I made my life look like his.

It wasn’t until I moved out that I began to see that there hadn’t been room for me in my relationship. And not merely because my ex hadn’t offered it — it had never occurred to me to ask. I was in love, and love meant making compromises, right? But what if I had loved him too much?

Years earlier I had read Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and thought I understood it, but I hadn’t. At 20, I gave myself over to love, and it wasn’t until the relationship ended, when I was 29, that I discovered what it meant to fully inhabit my days and the spaciousness of my own mind. It was such a joy to find that my time was mine, along with every decision from what to cook to when to go to bed.

I resolved that in my next relationship I would love more moderately, keeping more of me for myself.

When I met Mark, he fit into my life so easily it surprised me. My friends liked him. My dog, Roscoe, yelped with happiness at the sight of him. But when we started talking about living together, I was wary.

I worried that the minutiae of domesticity would change us into petty creatures who bickered over laundry. More than that, I worried I might lose myself again, to a man and a relationship, overtaken by those old ideas about how love conquers all.

Mark had his own reservations. “I don’t want to do it just because it’s what we’re supposed to do,” he said. “I only want to live together if it’ll make our lives better.”

We spent weeks anxiously enumerating the pros and cons of cohabitation.

Months earlier we had come across a book — “The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels” — that recommends short-term marriage contracts. We liked the idea and realized we could take this approach to living together.

Many of us don’t notice the ways romantic love acts as an organizing force in our lives, but it is powerful. Some use the term “relationship escalator” to describe the way we tend to follow familiar scripts as we proceed in a relationship, from casual dating to cohabitation to marriage and family. These scripts that tell us what love should look like are so ubiquitous they sometimes seem invisible.

In my last relationship, I had spent a lot of time worrying about whether we were moving up the escalator. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted, but trying to figure that out through conversation seemed terrifying. Instead, I picked fights, about money or chores or how to spend the weekend. If I was angry, it was somehow easier to be honest.

With Mark, I wanted to do better.

Our contract addresses much of what must be negotiated in any relationship, especially when cohabitating. It begins with our reasons for being together: “We aspire to help each other be more ethically-minded and generous friends, community members and global citizens.” I know it sounds idealistic, but I’ve had relationships that left me feeling lonely and small. This time I wanted to be more intentional about looking outward as much as we look in.

The terms range from the familiar (“We will take care of each other when one of us is sick”) to the fanciful (“If we’re both sick, it’s all up to the dog”). In fact, Roscoe gets an entire section, detailing his walking schedules, vet visits and even how sweet we think he is.

We have a houseguest section (guests can stay for up to two weeks but must be mutually vetted) and an item that deals with Mark’s sweaty running clothes (“He agrees to hang these up in the spare room or on the back of the bathroom door but he wants Mandy to know that this may be a fairly common occurrence”).

We agree to split the bill when eating out with one exception: “Special meals (date night, celebrations, etc.) will not be split so one person can treat the other.”

It was important to me to eat breakfast together because this was something my family did growing up, so we put that in writing. It’s amazing how empowering this can feel: to name your desires or insecurities, however small, and make space for them. It’s such a simple thing, but it wasn’t easy. I wasn’t used to knowing what I wanted in a relationship, much less saying it aloud. Now, I have to do both.

We wanted to take nothing for granted, which has meant having the kinds of conversations I previously avoided. Under “Sex and Intimacy,” for example, we wrote that we agree to be monogamous because, right now, monogamy suits us. But we don’t assume it’s what we will always want.

Our contract isn’t infallible, or the solution to every problem. But it acknowledges that we each have desires that deserve to be named and recognized.

As we concluded the recent renewal of our contract, Mark typed a new heading near the end: Marriage. “So what do you think?” he asked, sitting back as if he had just asked where I want to get takeout.

I stared into my beer. This wasn’t the first time we had talked about marriage, but now, with the contract open, it felt official. I squirmed, knowing that part of me wanted to say, “Let’s do it,” while another part wanted to reject the institution altogether and do love and commitment on our own terms.

“What would marriage offer us that we don’t already have?” I asked.

“Good question,” he said.

“It would be nice to hear our friends make funny and heartwarming speeches about us,” I told him. “But I don’t really want to plan a wedding, or pay for it.”

He agreed. And yet, we like this thing we have created.

I know that a lifetime commitment is supposed to involve a surprise proposal, a tearful acceptance and a Facebook slide show of happy selfies. But if it’s the rest of our lives, I want us to think it through, together.

Finally Mark typed: “We agree that marriage is an ongoing topic of conversation.”

It seemed a trivial thing to put in writing, but talking — instead of just waiting and wondering — has been a relief to us both.


As I type this, Mark is out for a run and the dog is snoring at a volume that is inordinately sweet, and I am at home in the spaciousness of my own mind. I have failed at my goal of loving more moderately, but for the first time in my life I feel as if there is room for me in my relationship, and space for us to decide exactly how we want to practice love.

It may look as though we’re riding the relationship escalator, but I prefer to think we’re taking the stairs.

DATING: SWALLOWING CUM DOES THE BODY GOOD

10 Facts About Cum That’ll Convert You To A Slutty Swallowing Machine.

Your man, or any man, for that matter, is rich — in vitamins. Creamy male goodness contains everything you need. With enough cum in your daily diet there is no need for supplements, pills, or juicing to meet all your daily vitamin intake requirements.

Yes, you read that correctly, sluts — not only is cum delicious, but it is also healthy for you as well! Who would have ever suspected?

Previously, the alleged benefits of cum were that they were are activated when a man dropped his load into a woman’s vagina. However, newer research suggests that the same benefits may be available if the cum is swallowed. Some theories even suggest that cum deposited anally will offer the same benefits(good news for all you anal sluts out there). The existence of “butt plugs” suggest that some may want to keep the cum inside to make sure they get the full benefits of cum’s many nutritious, miraculous properties.

1. Cum is a natural anti-depressant: Studies have shown that cum elevates your mood and even reduces suicidal thoughts (YES, really). Ever notice that a cum slut seems naturally happy and perky as long she she is getting her daily fix? That’s why.

2. Cum reduces anxiety: It boasts anti-anxiety hormones like oxytocin, serotonin, and progesterone. Why bother popping xanax, ativan, or any of other other man made chemicals when you get the same effect with no side effects and far more fun?

3. It improves the quality of your sleep: Cum contains melatonin, a sleep-inducing agent. A load a day and you will sleep like a baby.

4.  Cum increases energy giving you that much needed extra boost to go about your day to day activities. Take a few loads and marvel at how boundless your energy becomes. In no time you will be getting more done that you ever imagined possible.

5. Cum improves cardio health and prevents preeclampsia, which causes dangerously high blood pressure during pregnancy. Cum is not just good for you but for the baby too(for all you preggo sluts).

6. Cum even improves memory. With enough cum you will be amazed how soon you will have perfect total recall.

7. Improves mental alertness. Contrary to popular belief cum does not make you dumb. It actually boosts your brain’s processesing power and responsiveness.

8. Cum prevents morning sickness. If you don’t want to spend every morning puking your brains out than make sure you have a dick to suck, or two. You can never be too careful.

9. Cum slows down the aging process of your skin and muscles: It contains a healthy portion of zinc, which is an antioxidant. A veritable fountain of youth.

10. Cum reduces pains and aches. It is an all natural painkiller providing all the benefits and none of the harmful side effects of so many toxic, addictive pharmaceuticals.

Impressed? You should be! Nature is full of wonders, and cum is one of them! Some of the helpful chemicals in cum include testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, opiod peptides, oxytocin, serotonin, melatonin, and norepineprine. All of which can add to the overall quality of life for someone getting enough cum in their daily diet.

Just think, you can get a dose of all that without having to go to the vitamin store. Upon learning this you might be shocked, unable to comprehend everything you have just read, but it is all true. Cum is miraculous, and it has been around for centuries.  What is this telling you? The answer is simple. Suck a dick today and in no time you will see how much your life improves.

ARTICLE: Pornhub Is the Kinsey Report of Our Time By MAUREEN O’CONNOR

Waking up on a Sunday morning, I received a text about what happened after I left the previous night’s party. “Everyone got high and we played truth or dare. Ted and Ivan docked.”

“Are you serious?” I replied. “I thought that only happened in porn.” Defined by Urban Dictionary as “the act of placing the head of one’s penis inside the foreskin of another’s penis,” docking is an act that, until that fateful night, nobody at the party had attempted or witnessed firsthand. (Or so they claimed.) But once you know a thing is a thing, sometimes you can’t get it out of your mind. And in a fit of libidinous boredom, or idle curiosity, or lust, or who even knows why anyone does anything anyway — you do that thing. Because that thing exists, and so do you. At some point, someone had to.

On the internet, there is a maxim known as Rule 34, which states: If you can imagine it, there is porn of it. No exceptions. And now that we are solidly into the age of internet pornography, I believe we are ready for another maxim: If there is porn of it, people will try it. (Maybe we can call it Rule 35.) And if people are trying that thing, then inevitably some of them will make videos of that thing and upload those to the internet. The result: an infinitely iterating feedback loop of sexual trial and error. Once upon a time, someone would try something new on film and it would take years to circulate on VHS or DVD through a relatively small community of porn watchers. But today, even the mainstream is porn-literate, porn-saturated, and porn-conversant. For a sexual butterfly effect to take place, you don’t even need to try that thing with your body — you can watch it, text about it, post jokes about it on Tumblr, chat about it on Grindr, masturbate while thinking about it, and type its name into so many search engines as to alter the sexual universe. There is such a thing, now, as a sexual meme — erotic acts and fantasies that replicate and spread like wildfire.

For we are living in a golden age of sexual creativity — an erotic renaissance that is, I believe, unprecedented in human history. Today you can, in a matter of minutes, see more boners than the most orgiastic member of Caligula’s court would see in a lifetime. This is, in itself, enough to revolutionize sexual culture at every level. But seeing isn’t even the whole story — because each of us also has the ability to replicate, share, and reinvent everything we see. Taken as a whole, this vast trove of smut is the Kinsey Report of our time, shedding light on the multiplicity of erotic desires and sexual behaviors in our midst.

Some of these memes can jump into the real-world sex lives of the people watching them. In recent years, a number of sexual memes, ranging from the slightly risqué (spanking) to the more outré (docking) to the simply rude (motorboating), have even landed in the real-world sex lives of people I know. “Is learning to squirt a feminist thing now?” asked a female friend who read a how-to article on a blog. When another friend voiced frustration with hookups who kept “slapping” her vulva during sex, I reacted with horror. “I think they get it from porn,” she said. “But where do the porn people get it?” I asked, arriving at the chicken-or-egg question of our time: Do we fuck this way because of porn, or does porn look like this because it’s how we fuck — or would fuck, if our asses were that firm, our penises that priapic, and we knew how to tie such elaborate knots?

As long as there has been porn, there have been people worrying that porn is damaging sex. I’m not here to join that debate. The deeper we go down the internet-porn wormhole, the more it seems narrow-minded to understand porn exclusively in terms of what kind of sex it “teaches” us to have. Because in the streaming era, the amount and diversity of porn we watch exponentially outpaces that of the sex we have. Porn is bigger than its real-sex analog, and the difference isn’t just volume: The porn we see is weirder, wilder, and more particular than what most of us will ever have — or want — in our own lives. An expansive erotic landscape unto itself, pornography exists adjacent to and in constant conversation with real sex — but is much more capricious and capacious and creative. Pornography is more than a mere causal agent in the way we screw. It has also become a laboratory of the sexual imagination — and as such, it offers insight into a collective sexual consciousness that is in a state of high-speed evolution.

The speed of that evolution may be best observed in the deluge of sexual memes that depart from traditional real-world sexual behavior. In addition to acts like pussy-slapping and ball-squeezing — which could theoretically be included in some crazily updated version of The Joy of Sex — the new generation of sexual memes includes a new set of narrative memes. Pornographic scene-setting, erotic situations, and role-playing are being reinvented, and imaginations have expanded to accommodate a never-ending supply of novel stimuli. Some of these memes seem to live almost entirely within the realm of porn. (Does anybody enjoy being searched by the TSA?) Some may have real-world origins, but have undergone so much reimagining as to approach derivative art. (When homemade-porn versions of the video game Overwatch spiked last year, had there been a preceding spike in dirty talk in the headsets of Overwatch players?) And others are only acceptable when they don’t have real-world analogs. “Is it me or is there way too much stepdaughter porn lately?” a straight man recently asked. He was right, and it doesn’t stop there: In the U.S. in 2015 and 2016, the most popular search term on Pornhub was “stepmom.” Though he said he was “immensely insulted” by the genre, that didn’t prevent him from watching. “If I ignore the title and the girl looks hot, I open it.” And no, “stepsister” porn has not made him feel any different about his sisters, and I can go to hell for asking.

“The internet is for porn,” the rude puppets of Avenue Q sang in 2003. But acquiring and watching internet porn was actually kind of hard back then — images loaded slowly, videos took hours to download, and everything had to be saved in secret folders on your hard drive. On-demand video-streaming platforms were invented only in 2005, when a man named Jawed Karim was searching for videos of Janet Jackson baring her breast at the previous year’s Super Bowl. Frustrated with his findings, Karim joined forces with two colleagues from PayPal and founded YouTube. The site grew rapidly, but just as Janet Jackson teased — but never quite showed — her nipple, YouTube refrained from giving the internet what it really wanted: porn. And so a series of hard-core imitators did their best to replicate YouTube’s model: Xtube, YouPorn, RedTube, and the site that would eventually rule them all, Pornhub. (Literally. Pornhub’s umbrella company, MindGeek, owns all of those sites, now known as the “Pornhub network.”)



What We Learned About Sexual Desire From 10 Years of Pornhub User Data

The biggest adult website on the planet, Pornhub celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. The site serves 75 million visitors each day and is the 40th-most-trafficked website in the world (bigger than Google Canada). In the U.S., it’s the 20th-most-trafficked website. (Bigger than the New York Times, the Washington Post, ESPN, and BuzzFeed.) More than 10 million videos have been uploaded to Pornhub. Watching them all, back to back, would take 173 years. Which means every single person with access to the internet has access to more hard-core porn than she will have time to consume in her mortal life — and more is added every day.

Most porn viewers do not pay for the experience. Their visits are supported by the ads they see (for webcams, paid porn, hookup websites, penis pumps, escorts, boner pills, video games, food delivery, and the occasional clothing brand or Hollywood movie) and by the handful of visitors who, enticed by the free content, end up paying for premium material, either on one of MindGeek’s sites or on sites run by other studios. When streaming sites first launched, they lived largely off amateur and pirated content. But they quickly became so dominant that the studios had to get onboard — albeit with varying levels of enthusiasm — by posting their material in partnership with the tubes, or as preview clips designed to send traffic to their own websites. Today, the massive trove of free smut includes amateur clips uploaded by exhibitionists; semi-professional videos from people who might dabble in webcams or collect occasional royalty-like paychecks from the tubes, and whom Pornhub pays per page view; and those good old-fashioned, studio-produced pornos. (Not that today’s studio-produced pornography looks like the porn of yore, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) And a lot of the old stuff is online, too, categorized as “vintage” and “retro” porn.

How users navigate that material in private — what they choose to watch, in what sequence and for how long — is a sexual-sociological gold mine. MindGeek’s understanding of its users’ autoerotic habits is almost terrifyingly precise. Like Facebook, Google, Netflix, and every other major player online, Pornhub collects and analyzes a staggering amount of user data — some of which it uses, like those other companies, to help curate content and determine what a user sees. Pornhub also publicizes some of its anonymized findings on the company’s data-analytics blog, Pornhub Insights. (Which means the X-rated version of Netflix is actually more casual with its data than the real Netflix. Knowledge of the human condition, in the age of big data, is idiosyncratic and subject to corporate marketing strategies.) To celebrate the website’s tenth anniversary, Pornhub Insights analyzed a decade’s worth of data — and provided access to that data, granting us an unusual peek into the internet’s collective id. And it’s an id that is constantly shape-shifting — sometimes very rapidly. New sexual memes are invented daily, and when they explode in popularity, they can spawn thousands of spinoffs and imitators. And sometimes they fade away just as quickly — another porn fad that came, conquered, and vanished. Overnight.

A large number of the women I know who watch porn watch female massage porn. That is, porn in which a woman receives a massage from a masseuse of any gender, and at some point the masseuse switches from kneading her sore muscles to kneading something else. Few of us want to actually receive an erotic massage — the thought actually makes my skin crawl. Ever since massage porn became ubiquitous in my porn, I have been unable to endure professional, nonerotic massages: The porno version has worn a groove in my psyche that is too deep to ignore. In my mind, massage tables have become sexual apparatuses, and I cannot be near one in the presence of a stranger.

“Massage” enjoyed its first surge in popularity in 2010, and in the course of two years it skyrocketed from the abyss of little-known niche smut to become one of Pornhub’s top-ten search terms in the U.S. Though many studios and amateurs now contribute to the genre, Pornhub’s “Massage Rooms” channel is consistently among the most popular on the site. (On the day I wrote this, it was No. 16, but the rankings change from day to day.) Operated by a paid partner, the channel provides hundreds of 10- to 15-minute videos, free of charge, as recruiting material for their higher-quality pay-per-view services at MassageRooms.com.

Why massage? The appeal, for the women I spoke to, was not narrative but practical. Massage recipients look comfortable, which, for women in porn, is not always a given. (There’s nothing like a horrifyingly contorted hip flexor to distract you with questions like: Does that hurt? Does she do yoga? If I did yoga, could I do that? In 2015, a yoga-themed orgy video drove a massive spike in yoga-themed searches on Pornhub. The appeal, it seems, is the wardrobe: “yoga pants,” “ripped yoga pants,” and “tight yoga pants” were all more popular than “naked yoga.”) Female erotic-massage recipients are relaxed, enjoying themselves, and receiving pleasure from what amounts, ideally, to a pair of disembodied hands. There aren’t really story lines. You don’t have to search reams of videos to find a suitable set of partners. The genre’s conventions simplify the viewing experience. All that remains is the dedicated depiction of successful female arousal and pleasure. (A similar effect could contribute to lesbian pornography’s popularity with all women. “Lesbian” is the most-viewed category for women in most of the Americas, and Pornhub reports that North American women are 186 percent more likely to search for lesbian porn than men.) Of course, the genre has been reinvented in a thousand different ways, but there’s a principle here worth exploring: As we are consumers of pornography, our viewing patterns are undeniably part of our erotic lives, but that doesn’t mean our porn lives are part of our sex lives — at least, not directly.

Instead, pornography trains us to redirect sexual desire as mimetic desire. That is, the sociological theory — and marketers’ dream — that humans learn to want what they see. In porn terms: If you build it, they will come. Women who want to see images of female sexual pleasure learn to use “massage” as a shortcut to find it, triggering a feedback loop that brings them more massage porn and encourages pornographers to make more of it. “We license content from studios based on our users’ viewing habits,” Pornhub vice-president Corey Price said, explaining how the company uses its data. “We regularly send reports to our content partners featuring top searches in various regions so they can better cater to users.” What may look like a pure marketplace of desire that rewards the most popular erotic content is, of course, also a corporate environment shaped by investment decisions, marketing strategies, and studio leverage. And even the data that informs executives like Price doesn’t necessarily contain answers to why a genre is popular, just that it is. Many of these trends seem to be self-contained. Whether massage porn had shown up in 2008, 2010, or 2012, it would have been equally appealing.

Other memes don’t stick — but are still nostalgic reminders of pornography’s power to unleash our sexual imaginations. Remember “Big Sausage Pizza”? In the early days of online porn, Big Sausage Pizza was a studio that showed a giggling pizza deliveryman conspiring with a friend who, viewers were led to believe, was holding the camera to record a prank. The deliveryman would contrive a reason to sit down and put the pizza on his lap — and open the top to reveal his own tumescent penis, popping up through a hole cut in the pizza. Fellatio in proximity to melted cheese would ensue.

Big Sausage Pizza did not last. Though pizza-delivery guys are still a staple in the autoerotic landscape (in a blog post last year, Pornhub reported that “pizza” was searched about 500,000 times each month), other gimmicks have taken over. Take, for instance, Pornhub’s most popular studio of 2014, Fake Taxi. This studio shoots what amounts to fairly conventional heterosexual sex scenes — a man and a woman meet for the first time and end up engaging in a variety of acts. Sometimes commerce comes into play — maybe the woman ran out of money and pays with sexual favors instead. The narratives end up similar to those in Big Sausage Pizza, as well as other porno tropes designed to manufacture a reason for a strange man to show up at a mansion to fuck someone else’s wife — because she ordered food, or had a leaky faucet, or needed the pool cleaned. (And maybe she ran out of cash, or couldn’t flee, or was just horny.) But today’s porn studios are rarely working with budgets that allow decadent settings and sweeping camera angles. Stranger-sex in the tube-porn era takes place in the back seat of a car on the side of an empty road, with fixed dashboard and point-of-view cameras. Similar moods appear in videos where women are pulled over by big-dicked cops who join them in the back seats of their cars; are selected for additional screening at the airport; and get into sexual situations during job interviews in tiny offices with no windows. (Think of all the overhead you save by filming in a neon-lit cubicle instead of a sunlit mansion.) An efficient sexual meme can use one narrative (say, traffic cop) to satisfy a multiplicity of desires (strangers, authority figures, uniforms, power dynamic, female desperation, and other categories you never knew existed, much less would have tried to find). The new setups look different from the old ones, but ultimately they’re designed to stimulate a not-dissimilar set of tastes.

Another exemplar of the fixed-space stranger-sex genre comes from a studio called Backroom Casting Couch, which blew up in 2010. All of the videos were filmed on a black leather sofa in a nondescript room, and were structured to sound like an interview for an erotic-modeling job. The male interviewer instructs the model to strip, then cajoles her into a variety of sex acts. Usually, the fact that she’s “never done this before” gets played up — she gets to be both the virgin and the whore, a naïf who has never been bad before but can be persuaded to do so now. (It’s “Blurred Lines” for people who think sexual harassment can be hot.) Or, more accurately, tricked into doing so. The company’s slogan articulates the story’s central conceit: “There is no modeling job.” In reality, of course, there is a job — the job is the porn. A handful of performers have gone on the record after the fact to confirm that they signed up for porn (and got paid for it, too). But the Backroom Casting fantasy is about the acquisition of undeserved sexual capital, paired with the amateur feel of a “real man” documenting those conquests. After Backroom Casting made it big, the Pornhub Network expanded to include the studio Reality Kings, which was one of the first to use the shaky-camera porn vérité that characterizes so many of these “Blurred Lines” subgenres. The network also distributes content from Fakehub, which produces Fake Taxi as well as Fake Cop, Fake Driving School, and Fake Agent. Ten years into the streaming era, and we are many generations of porn evolution beyond basic generic categories like “orgy,” “milf,” and “teen.” Not that the classics don’t persist — just that the categories have gotten much more detailed and sophisticated.

In fact, the variations can seem infinite. By putting “fake” in its title, Fake Agent probably grabs up viewers who have the same basic tastes as Backroom Casting Couch fans but don’t like the cognitive dissonance created by the vérité marketing. Acknowledging the artifice excuses viewers who might feel uneasy with the fantasy or need reassurance that no real coercion is taking place. (Some videos even feature before-and-after interviews with the performers, explaining what’s real and what isn’t. Of course, sometimes those interviews can turn into performances in their own right. Pornography is a very self-aware medium.) Fakehub’s narratives also provide an excuse for tapping into the moods found in amateur pornography. “Amateur” is Pornhub’s third-most-popular category of all time, and in 2009, the company launched the Pornhub Community to encourage the DIY set. Though piracy may have taken a bite out of the porn industry’s profits, the rise of amateur pornography both cut into the market and revealed the market’s appetite for tastes that had long been ignored. Turns out a lot of people weren’t as excited about watching improbably perfect bodies engaging in unbelievably acrobatic acts in impossibly decadent settings as the porn industry had led us to think; they often really wanted the lo-fi realism of normal people in their messy bedrooms. In 2013, a data scientist named Jon Millward analyzed 10,000 performer bios on the Internet Adult Film Database and found that the “typical” female porn star was not the fake-boobed blonde of stereotypes but a five-foot-five-inch brunette with a B-cup. (She was, however, 48 pounds lighter than the average American woman. Similarly, the average male performer was of average height but less-than-average weight.)

Porn is a theater of the id, and America’s id is racist.

Sometimes a sexual meme’s rise can have as much to do with curiosity as with libido — but will end up with real staying power. Such may be the case with cuckolding, a fetish genre in which a man watches his wife have sex with another man as a means of emasculation. (Or to manufacture a “homosexual alibi,” as Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men author Jane Ward argues in an analysis of the video series “Cum-Eating Cuckolds.” After watching his wife have sex with a rival, the cuck “must submit to both of them in order to keep his wife,” ultimately by swooping in once the sex is done and ingesting the other man’s semen. It’s called “cleanup,” and it’s the third-most-common search term to be paired with “cuckold,” after “humiliation” and “amateur.”) “Every month, 1.75 million people search some variation of ‘cuckold,’ ‘cuck,’ or ‘cucked’ on Pornhub,” the Pornhub Insights blog observed last year, when “cuck” crossed into politics as an alt-right insult designed to emasculate right-wing moderates. But whereas other news-driven search terms will spike in popularity when the public first finds out about them, then drop back to their previous baseline, cuck porn hasn’t dropped all the way back down. Sometimes you don’t know you’re into that thing until you stumble across it after listening to The Rush Limbaugh Show — and then you can’t let go.

Cuck videos frequently have racial dynamics — white men eroticize their anxiety about black-male sexuality by creating humiliation fantasies that involve sexually superior black rivals. Porn has always been a place for indulging irrational, secret, and socially unacceptable desires — which makes it a place where people feel free to let their racial prejudices and fantasies run wild, too. Porn is a theater of the id, and America’s id is racist. To browse pornography is to stroll through a library of stereotypes that can be viscerally and unshakably disturbing. For the past decade, seeing women who look like me — Asian women — in sexual contexts has meant seeing women who look like me being abused, dominated, and defiled. Is this how people see me? I used to wonder, but perhaps the most disturbing realization is that I don’t ask that question anymore. I was in college when the first tube sites launched, and I remember telling a friend that I had been browsing the “Asian” section of a free porn site looking for women who looked like me. The color drained from his face. “Don’t do that,” he said. “It’s masochistic in a way that’s really disturbing. You need to stop.” When did Asian-fetish porn stop bothering me? Did I get better at compartmentalizing? Did the porn get gentler? Have I become jaded? Or have I settled into a bleak form of sexual pragmatism — just as I have learned to set aside ethical and aesthetic irritations in the name of having fun on the dance floor even when “Blurred Lines” is playing, I have learned to look past racially dubious imagery. (Literally, I move my eyes past it as quickly as possible.) That’s just how this dance floor is, and apparently I don’t care enough to quit or find a new one.

Of course, politically incorrect racial fantasia aren’t the only eroticized taboo. For several years, culture writers have been trying to figure out why incest porn is so unstoppable. Some argue that in the game of ever-escalating taboo-busting, incest is the last and most intractable taboo — it always titillates. The fact that the genre has, in the past decade, included lightning-rod performances from actual sets of twins (and other possible blood relations) seems to bolster that theory. But in its most popular incarnations, I’d argue that “stepdaughter,” “stepmom,” and “stepsibling” porn has less in common with incest than it does with Fakehub. Since everyone knows the performers aren’t actually family members, words like “stepdaughter” function as a dysphemism — that is, the opposite of a euphemism. (In other words: a way to have your taboo-flavored creampie and eat it, too.) It’s a more offensive way to announce a number of stepdaughter-adjacent qualities, like youth and innocence. My friend who complained about “stepdaughter” porn might not like the imaginary leaps that stepdaughter porn invites him to take, but if he’s already watching young-looking actresses feigning innocence with older men, can he really blame Pornhub for offering, as his next video, a girl with pigtails cooing “daddy”?

As technology has breathed life into fantasies ranging from familiar to recognizable-but-iterated-into-weirdness to utterly strange, it has also helped create a few outright. Take the tenth-most-popular Pornhub category of all time: hentai, a Japanese term that literally means “transformation” and refers to perversion. But for English-speaking porn consumers, it’s the catchall term for anime and manga porn. The “transformations” depicted in hentai are sometimes anatomical — eyes bigger than feet, breasts the size of heads, penises thicker than waists. Cartoon imaginations can go places that special effects cannot — including fantastical paranormal pairings and supernatural beings that combine the sexy human shapes with candy-colored fur and animal horns, ears, and tails. Meanwhile, the mind’s eye is free to go where cameras cannot — like a cutaway rendering of a woman’s uterus as a Godzilla-like monster fills it with semen. Body parts can morph mid-sex, swelling and shrinking and shape-shifting in ways that make the most fantastical works of Western literature, like Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver’s Travels, seem quite basic. But the bigger change is in audience. Literary erotica — from the Marquis de Sade to Nicholson Baker — was similarly playful but reached a fraction of the audience that a video that winds up on Pornhub’s front page will in, like, minutes.

The legacy of Sade is certainly visible on Pornhub — even though, for all its abundance, it’s a site defined primarily by mainstream taste. The free-porn model relies not only on a large quantity of low-cost and amateur porn but on preview-length clips provided by studios serving a number of smaller niches. Since the vast majority of people don’t pay to watch porn, the content they consume is essentially being paid for by the slim minority whose spending is lucrative enough to keep the enterprise afloat — and that group skews to the niche, fringe, and extreme. For those people, all 10 million videos on Pornhub are just a preview, and I mean that quite literally: Most professional studios provide teaser content to tube sites willingly, which means if the porn looks elaborate and expensive, it probably is, which means that the handful of people who are into that type of porn are probably really into it. Which brings us to Kink.com.

Asked how he discovered bondage, Kink.com founder Peter Acworth cites the ropes and lassos in Western movies from his youth. Every time the cowboys and Indians tied each other up, Peter would get excited. His first foray into adult entertainment was a series of bondage videos he uploaded to the web from his Columbia University dorm room in 1997, which he posted to a site called Hogtied. (The models were nude, but bondage and sex were kept strictly separate. Back then, hard-core bondage was verboten.) Today, Hogtied is one of the 34 channels packaged together on Kink.com; a month’s access costs $50. Other offerings include Foot Worship; Men in Pain; Whipped Ass; Struggling Babes; Electrosluts (which involves tasers, cattle prods, and electric shocks); TS Pussy Hunters (transwomen dominating ciswomen); TS Seduction (transwomen dominating cismen); Naked Kombat (male wrestling where the winner tops the loser); and Ultimate Surrender (female wrestling where the winner tops the loser with a strap-on).

Whereas Backroom Casting Couch and Fake Taxi stay in business in the age of free porn by keeping production costs low, companies like Kink do it by catering to highly specific tastes, which viewers are often more willing to spend on. If your thing is skinny girls having vanilla sex with strangers, you don’t need to pay for porn. Designing specific experiences for fans, though, like private webcam shows and personalized clips, can be highly lucrative. In 2014, Kink auctioned a one-hour cam session with Maitresse Madeline, a dominatrix. The winning bid was $42,000. Niche audiences have a harder time finding their thing at volumes great enough to titillate and surprise on a regular basis, or maybe they’re just more dedicated — it’s hard to say. Either way, the business works much as Pornhub does: by giving the audience a taste for things they didn’t know they wanted until they saw them.

Consider the fucking machine. It’s a mechanized device for, well, fucking a person, usually by pumping a dildo in and out of one or more orifices. (Chain-saw-like machines lined with tongues are also popular.) Sometimes the setup involves gynecological stirrups, a specially designed seat, and straps or cuffs binding the performer to the machine — these machines can be very elaborate. Kink’s first piston-powered machine was made by an engineer Acworth found on Craigslist. But such machines have a tendency to multiply: Immediately after the first machine’s debut, fans started building their own and shipping them to the company’s old office in the San Francisco Armory. The machines ranged from an X-rated and fully operational replica of Short Circuit’s Johnny 5, to a Kitchen Aid mixer with a dildo, to a Pilates reformer with phallic accessories, to a rotary-operated ass-tapper that resembles a pump-jack oil rig.

Were people fantasizing about fucking machines before Kink prompted them to? Sure, probably. Several of the machines in Kink’s two mechanized porn channels — Fucking Machines and Butt Machine Boys — resemble images from “The Fornicon,” a suite of erotic drawings Tomi Ungerer published in the 1960s. (Ungerer is also famous for illustrating fairy tales.) But some portion of the audience are people who never imagined a fucking machine until they saw one on the internet. These machines provide novel stimulus for fans of solo sex, dildos, extreme penetration, and uncontrollable orgasms. (Not to mention fans of Short Circuit, baking, and Pilates.)

I do not like fucking machines. Initially, I attributed this to my gender. Surely this is a straight-male fantasy, I thought. It’s about performance anxiety, or the male desire to make women orgasm without exerting oneself or risking failure. Many of the machines advertised on Kink would seem to require poses involving the aforementioned hip-flexor issue. But Fucking Machines is the second-most-popular channel among Kink’s female audience. A spin through Kink’s message boards reveals that the appeal can be quite similar to massage porn — minimum plot, maximum pleasure — but for women who are more sexually intense (and perhaps more flexible) than I. One woman’s extreme-penetration fucking machine is another woman’s gentle massage.

And one man’s fetish is another man’s party trick. Reached for comment, the men who docked that Saturday night maintain that they did it merely for the LOLs. “The whole thing started because we had a vacation rental with an actual dock,” Ted said. “Ever since someone made a dock-on-dock pun, we’ve had dock on the brain.” Neither man had a boner. There was no foreplay. (Recognizing that the public may struggle to accept their penis-in-penis innocence, Ted and Ivan requested pseudonyms, which I have granted.) Just two men inserting the heads of their penises into one another’s foreskins. They were in a weird mood. They’d seen it on the internet. Why not?

POETRY: BEFORE I SAW HER

Before I saw her, I...
didn't believe
in love at first sight.
Thought it was bullshit.
And then I saw this...
reckless girl who had forgotten
how beautiful she was,
and I thought,
I thought if I could wake up
every day and look into that face,
I could get through anything.
And you...
were standing

ARTICLE: Failure to Launch: When Beauty Fades BY ELIZABETH WURTZEL

 “riding the carousel” which, to put it nicely, means a gal sleeping around, hooking up, and having casual, no strings sex during her teens, 20s, and early 30s with alpha male and finally settling down with Beta.

When you are younger your market sexual value is high
When you are older your market sexual value is low.

Elizabeth Wuretzel learn the hard way. BTY...i love the movie based on her first book




When she was younger




  and NOW

Because I need to make a point, I'm just going to be immodestly candid: I was a remarkably adorable child, the kind with such rosily expressive cheeks that grown-ups couldn't resist pinching them. So when I became a teenager and then an adult, I was what you would call a hot number or something like that—at any rate, they put me half-dressed on the covers of my books to sell them, so draw what you will from that. Now that I'm in my forties, people say, I think kindly, She still looks good. This is to be followed by a phase of ...for her age, which is hot on the trail of handsome, and then—then who knows? I think it deteriorates from there, enough so that the vain among us start to look forward to death, or at least stop resisting its horrific pull.

So here's what I'm getting at: I was, at least at some baseline, a pretty girl, the kind that boys were supposed to like and sometimes did. And because I was cute all along—it's not like I blossomed into honeysuckle after adolescence—I was given to believe that love would be easy, men would be elementary, and I would have my way. I was meant to date the captain of the football team, I was going to be on a romantic excursion every Saturday night, I was destined to be collecting corsages from every boy in town before prom, accepting such floral offerings like competing sacrifices to a Delphic goddess. It was all supposed to be to the tune of some glorious Crystals song from the early '60s, when everything was still innocent, and my life would be a wall of sound from "Then He Kissed Me." Love would be simpler than tying a string bikini, the kind I wore a lot while waiting on the beach for my ship to come in.

Alas, love has been complicated.

The men have piled up in my past, have fallen trenchantly through my life, like an avalanche that doesn't mean to kill but is going to bury me alive just the same. There's really no point, this late in the day, in picking through all the boys in order—alphabetical, chronological, epistemological—but looking back, I have been in far too many scenes that could have happened in a John Cassavetes movie or an Edward Albee play, if only they rose to that literary level. I attract (and seek) bottle throwing, foot stomping, door slamming, pot clanging, hair pulling, and, above all, a lot of loud screaming and walking out in a huff—usually leaving me crying, wondering what just happened, or, more often, too astonished to cry.

Or else: There is the thrill of loving for a little while—a night, a week, a month, even a year—and then loving stops, just like that, in the coldest, blankest way, a screen going snowy at the end of a movie. There is no yelling, only silence—the kind in a Carole King song: the phone that doesn't ring, or the words you didn't say that you think of on the staircase spiraling down once the door is locked behind, or maybe even months later.

When I was still in my twenties, for several years I had this wonderful boyfriend; I'll call him Gregg—he's the one we're all waiting for: tall, blue-eyed, with this thick black hair, all smart and sensitive, an inveterate graduate student who used to rub my feet at the end of the day with a lovely pink peppermint lotion from the Body Shop. It was young and romantic. You'd have thought we were happy. I think really we were happy. He was good for me: People met him and liked me better because I was going out with him; his sweetness redounded to me like a sunny day on a dark sidewalk. I could have and probably should have spent the rest of my life with him, might have avoided scenes like the time some guy I was seeing later on chased me down Topanga Canyon with a hot frying pan, screaming at me something about learning to make my own goddamn omelets. In other words, had I just stuck with the good boyfriend, I could have prevented a good deal of extraneous craziness.

But something went wrong—terribly wrong. The calm I had during those years was like a dormant illness or an allergy that doesn't emerge until later in life, or something you don't see coming because it's coming from within: You are making yourself ill. I became seasick with contentment. It was nauseating daily, and I couldn't still myself against a funny feeling that there had to be more to life than waking up every day beside the same person. To say I was bored would be to misunderstand boredom: I did not need to take up table tennis or ballroom dancing—I needed a sense that this wasn't the end of the story. The idea of forever with any single person, even someone great whom I loved so much like Gregg, really did seem like what death actually is: a permanent stop. Love did not open up the world like a generous door, as it should to anyone getting married; instead it was the steel clamp of the iron maiden, shutting me behind its front metal hinge to asphyxiate slowly, and then suddenly. Every day would be the same, forever: The body, the conversation, it would never change—isn't that the rhythm of prison?

My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me. I was temporarily credentialed with this delicate, yummy thing—youth, beauty, whatever—and my window of opportunity for making the most of it was so small, so brief. I wanted to smash through that glass pane and enjoy it, make it last, feel released.

And so, I cheated on him. With everyone I could. Bass players, editors, actors, waiters who wished they were actors, photographers. And everywhere I could, like that Sarah Silverman and Matt Damon video: on the floor, by the door, up against the minibar. I couldn't sit still or stand still or lie still. And I didn't want to lose Gregg either.

He knew, or must have known. But he was such a gentle guy that he gave me a chance to fix the damage. We were sitting at brunch one Sunday; Gregg was in his denim jacket and Sonic Youth T-shirt, his hair swept across his face, and he grabbed my hand over the table and looked at me so earnestly that if it had been a movie, the audience would have laughed. "I wish I could make whatever is bothering you feel better," he said.

"I know," was all I could say.

Months later, when Gregg found out for sure what I was doing, when he went through files on my Mac and found letters never sent to this lover or that one, he didn't want to make me feel better anymore. He threw a two-thirds-empty bottle of Stolichnaya at my head when I finally found him at a friend's house. He told me, I was your only chance at happiness—now it's over for you.

Years later, when I was dating a guy who drank much too much and did things like toss lamps around because he had a temper when he was loaded, and I was ducking to avoid some projectile and wondering how I'd found my way to this, I knew Gregg had been right: I could have been a contender; it was over.

And then, somehow, years go by.

Dating this person for three months, that one for a few weeks, sometimes longer. They come, they go, someone is always coming as someone else is going; it's not like there's no one, but it's all so lonely. I have no trouble meeting them, and I meet them everywhere: the usual places like friends' rooftop barbecues and downtown dive bars—but also in business meetings, where we end up making eyes at each other instead of working, or standing in movie lines or walking home at night. I am a hopeless, shameless flirt. I wish I were shyly, quietly intriguing, like Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, like someone French and fashionable who knows how to twirl her ladylike locks just so and walk adroitly on kitten heels, who is all gesture and whisper—but I am unfortunately forward and forthright: When I am interested in a man, he absolutely knows it. And I like men quite a lot and convey so much excitement and heat that I can keep the game going, at least for a while. Occasionally, I meet someone truly wonderful, and my heart breaks because I don't know how to sustain the energy. It never quite starts, and I can't tell you how it ends—all this pretty persuasion is a big pull for men, but then they're gone. All of them. Somehow, I can seduce and be seduced for a moment here and there, but I can't seem to meaningfully connect. That's why it's not seduction at all; if it were, I'd be getting what I want.

And I can get what I want in so much of life. I can sell sand to the Saudis, tea to the Bengalis. I get fired from one great job and then hired by a better organization. I decide in my thirties to go to law school and get into the very best one despite some questionable credentials. It's what you would call not a bad life, even a good one.

But I am baffled by men. When they want me, I don't want them; when I want them, they don't want me. We are just shooting dirty pool. Or maybe it's more like I'm still sitting at the baccarat table at a smoky, dingy casino in Reno, it's well past 3 a.m., I'm in hock to the house, I'm drinking bottom-shelf martinis and eating stale canapés from the complimentary smorgasbord, my mascara is smudged, there's no reason to reapply Cherries in the Snow to my chapped lips, it's long past the point where any reasonable person would have cashed in her chips and gone home—but I keep thinking I still might win or at least break even one of these hours or days.

Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you've got all this great wisdom, you don't get to be young anymore. And in this world, that's just about the worst thing that can happen—especially to a woman. Whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it's more that maturity is wasted on the old. I was both emotionally unkempt and mentally unhinged—deeply depressed, drugged, sensitive, and nasty all at once—during the years I was supposed to be spousing up. My judgment was so lousy, I probably deserve plentiful wedding gifts—Tiffany silverware to serve several dozen—for all the people I didn't marry, because the men I dated were awfully bad choices, and I was not such a good bet myself.

These days, I am a stable adult professional—a practicing attorney, capable of common sense—but I still know how to live life on the edge. I was a terrifically brooding and mature teenager, then a whiny and puerile adult, and now I may finally approximate the grace of a person who has come of age. But it took a very long time—probably far too long. Now that I am a woman whom some man might actually like to be with, might actually not want to punch in the face—or, at least, now that I don't like guys who want to do that to me—I am sadly 41. I am past my perfect years.

No one says to my face that 41 is just a little too old to still be dating—in fact, people like to point out how it's normal these days, which is also true—but I know what's up. I just moved a couple of months ago, and I made a determined effort to put my effects in order. I went through a box of old photographs and contact sheets from shoots I had done throughout my twenties and thirties, pictures in all kinds of poses, various stages of dishabille and froufrou and frippery, too much makeup and barely a bit of blush, Kodachrome and black and white, in studios and hotel rooms and cornfields and corners of streets—piles of portraits, marking a life. And I looked at the girl in all these images, as varied as they were, and still I could see the same person somewhere in there. But most of all it wasn't me anymore. It's not what I look like now—I have aged since. Oh, it's nothing to cry about, nothing to mourn for—I probably have another decade before I really start to look old, but something has changed.

I don't know what it is—I don't have wrinkles or age spots or any of the telltale signs that the years have gone by. Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates—and, yes, hot sex, which is good fun and may be no more than a Maginot Line against the inevitable, but that's not nothing. And my hair, honey-highlighted for years now, has the swank length of mermaid youth—which is how I plan to keep it no matter what proper pageboy is age-appropriate. No question, there are physical facts about my age that are undeniably delightful. I am much sexier now than I used to be—I suddenly have this voluptuous body where I used to just be skinny and lithe. Really oddly, a couple of years ago I got serious breasts, to the point where people think I've had them surgically enhanced, which I certainly have not. Still, I think, the honest truth is that I'm just not as pretty as I used to be. Something has abandoned me. I don't know what that thing is—they've been trying to jar it and bottle it for centuries—but it's left, another merciless lover. My hips are thicker, my skin is thinner, my eyes shine less brightly—will I ever again glow as if all the stars are out at night just to greet me? What finally falls away, after enough things don't go as planned, is that look of expectancy—which, when worn down to pentimento, is revealed to be exhaustion.

So here's the funny thing: There seem to be more men coming around these days, and they keep getting younger as I get older—I'm an interesting, mature woman to a man in his twenties, while to a guy my age, I'm just jaded—but I think they are falling in love with a person I used to be, with a girl in a picture, with an idea or an image, not with who or what I am now. Because with every passing second, I feel I am less physically desirable, even though I'm finally, in fact, a desirable person. It makes no sense, it's not fair, and it sucks.

I'm hopeful that there will be a moment in the next few years when I'll be more striking than ever because some aura will wash over me in that way that these things just do: as when feminine confidence and feisty intelligence overwhelm the depredations of age, and suddenly women smolder anew—running companies, winning Oscars, reaping millions, landing heavenly younger men. After all, there are many famous women who seem ageless, like Catherine Deneuve; or have aged sexily, like Susan Sarandon; have aged voluptuously, like Catherine Zeta-Jones; have aged beauti­fully, like Michelle Pfeiffer. But eventually, at some somber and sobering calendar date, most of us lose our looks and likewise one of our charms—and I will lose mine. At which time, for me at least, there won't be much point to life anymore at all.

I don't want to look back at what was, tell stories of once upon a long time ago, of what I used to do, of the men I once knew way back when, of 1,001 rapturous nights that were and are no more—I don't want my life to be the trashy and tragic remains of a really great party, lipstick traces on a burned-out cigarette at the bottom of a near-empty champagne goblet. Sex and sexuality, at least for me, are not some segment of life; they are the force majeure, the flood and storm and act of God that overtakes the rest. Without that part of me, I'd rather be dead. And I know all I can do right now is hold on tight to the little bit of life that's left, cling to the edge of the skyscraper I'm slipping off of, feel my fingers slowly giving way, knowing I'm going to free-fall to a sorrowful demise.

Maybe I would not have to hold on with such tough white knuckles if I'd done things right when I was still young.

Oh, to be 25 again and get it right. People who say they have no regrets, that they don't look back in anger, are either lying or boring, not sure which is worse. Because if you've lived a full life and don't feel bad about some of what you did, pieces are missing. Still, there are some mistakes that one is eventually too old—either literally or spiritually—to correct. I can't go back.

PERSONAL: FOR THE WOMAN WHO REFUSES TO SPEND HER LIFE AS JUST THE GIRLFRIEND

For the woman who refuses to spend her life as 'just the girlfriend' from the one who's planning to split from her long-term partner because seeing other friends get engaged 'breaks her heart' -I am here for you. While the vast majority of women are happy to let their relationships develop at their own pace - there are apparently quite a few who feel the total opposite...i am looking for you.

Ladies, don't play wife to a man who had no intentions of marrying you at least moving into the next stage of your relationship. *If a man cannot see you in his future, then why waste your time on him? If he cannot make a future commitment with you then LEAVE!!! No matter how hard, it will only end in tears anyway. *Men know what they want and who they want, and will actively pursue the woman they want in their life. *DO NOT give a man who is just your boyfriend a child. Your body clock, I'm sorry to say, is a bitch. I don't say this in order to hurt its feelings. But the tick-tock of women's fertility, which starts declining at 33

I want to get married. I was married before. I love marriages that work; I love the stability that comes with marriage, the family structure, the coming together of two families, the meeting of hearts, and the love. It’s all so beautiful.

And if you want to get married then your first challenge will be to figure out what your priorities are in a husband so you can make the best “deal” possible.  A good way to do this is list what you would trade for what.  Is a good job more important than height?  Is a sense of humor more important than looks?  How much game would you be willing to give up for some other quality.Keep in mind that this isn’t about settling, it is about getting the most bang for your Sexual Market Value buck.  If you can pull a man who looks like Brad Pitt, is 6 ft 6, has perfect game and earns like Bill Gates then of course you should do so.

PERSONAL:DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LOVE AND CHEMISTRY

My approach to dating is very different. I don't believe in chemistry.My personal experience shows that the very spark  that attracted me to her also made me  ignore all the red flags. Sure, She treats me like crap, but she is so attractive and hot, ahhhh, can’t wait to see her again. Then one day she goes too far, and I snap, I was okay with all her bad behavior previously, what has gotten into me now? And the answer is, the spark has left the building. It wasn't love because  Love doesn’t flee. Love endures.

What you notice is that when you’re incredibly attracted to someone, all of your critical thinking powers immediately go out the window.This is why you’ll put up with a man who only calls you once a week, a man who doesn’t call you his girlfriend after three months, a man who doesn’t propose after three years. If you were thinking critically, you’d never put up with this, but you’re not.

All I’m pointing out here, is that while chemistry is an incredible feeling, it is in no way a solid predictor of your future. It’s literally just a feeling. A feeling that masks your partner’s worst traits and allows you to put up with them.

You don’t have to trust me. Just look back on the greatest chemistry you’ve ever felt and think about how those relationships ended. Ask yourself if you want to be in another relationship where you’re always fighting and you never feel secure in your future.

What is more important, getting your next chemistry *fix*, or improving your prospects at finding love? I read so many women write in their profile that they can’t fall in love *without* this elusive chemistry. But there are different kinds of chemistry – short acting (lightning strikes, gone in 60 seconds, when the relationship fails – which most women are only too accustomed to), or long acting(the kind that takes, months, if not years to evolve and appreciate). And the first one *is*(no matter how much you might not want to believe), poorly correlated with women and stable relationships

Love can be built and nurtured but most folks apparently don’t know this, so they only believe in spontaneous love which is based on attraction and not compatibility.How can love ever exist without chemistry. The same way a delicious plate would never  exist without the right amount of ingredients.

And my advice for those seeking for true love...do what I do.....look for someone that has the qualities you seek for in your life partner then go for it and watch how the feelings and chemistry gradually develops later. If you want to find love – a love that endures – you have to find a new way than the one you’ve been using for your whole life.